Started using Gitlab CI

Jan 14, 2022

This post is both a test that everything is working, and a tiny review of Gitlab CI.

Previously, to update this site I had to clone the site locally, do my work on a test branch, merge my changes with the live branch, push to a remote repo, login to my private Jenkins instance, and then activate the job that compiles the static content and pushes it to the public Gitlab pages repo.

Needless to say, that was an unnecessarily complicated and annoying process. (although tbf, I could have automated the Jenkins part using hooks, but at the time I set it up I wanted manual control as a safety check)

But now, I adopted Gitlab's CI feature to streamline everything. And I gotta say, it's pretty nice. Now whenever I want to update the site, I can do everything from the Gitlab website. I just open up my repo, active the WebIDE, and start writing. When I'm done, I just need to click the "commit" button, and everything will get updated automatically!

And the awesome thing is that Gitlab CI is available in self-hosted instances as well. I've been recently looking for a CI solution for some projects to replace Jenkins, and was hesitant to use Gitlab because I didn't want my entire ecosystem dependent on a single tool. But considering Gitlab can be self-hosted, and the CI files are very simple to write, that's not much of an issue.